Category: issues

The city of Melbourne doled out nearly AUS$3 million in arts grants this past week, but controversy is brewing over the way the money was shared amongst the city’s cultural groups. “While 109 organisations and individuals from almost 300 applications shared in an annual funding pool of more than $1.5 million, six major Melbourne arts organisations – the International Arts Festival, the Fringe Festival, the Comedy Festival, the Film Festival, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Circus Oz – shared $1.4 million in triennial funding.” The funding decisions left some of Melbourne’s smaller arts groups gasping for financial breath.

“President Bush made only one reference to Hollywood in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, and it was almost in passing, but he hit the moviemaking community where it lives.” In one sense, it’s merely a case of one candidate taking advantage of an easy target set up by his opponent. But the Kerry/Hollywood flap has proved to have legs as a political story, and may serve to highlight a larger clash of values, between what the GOP sees as the conservative “heartland” and what Democrats see as the star power of the mainly liberal world of big entertainment.

With thousands of Republican conventioneers flooding the streets of Manhattan this past week, a cynic might have predicted that it would be a slow week in the New York art world. The cynic would have been right: one gallery, owned by conservatives from Georgia, held a blowout party for Senator Zell Miller, but other than that, the city’s galleries and museums were left out in the cold by a political party which is increasingly cut off from the art world. “While there were 4,853 delegates and alternates at the convention, only 133 delegates and their family members checked in at a desk set up in the [Metropolitan Museum of Art’s] lobby to offer them special tours.”

The US Congress is considering serious reform in the oversight of non-profit organizations. “The overall drive to nonprofit reform began after the passage of the federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which Congress enacted in the wake of Enron and other accounting scandals. After revelations that a small number of charities, such as those handling the millions received after Sept. 11, 2001, had engaged in similar abuses and administrative waste, the drive quickly intensified.”

Slovakia’s culture minister proposes that the country triple its spending on the arts by 2010. “Ignorance of culture is colossal; society is commercial, consumer-oriented and kitschy, and it seems this trend cannot be stopped.”

The Australian government has decided to focus on funding classical music this year. But the official opposition party denounces the policy, decrying what it terms the Government’s “war on culture, citing alleged political appointments to the boards of the ABC and Canberra’s new national museum.”

An annual list of the world’s top universities puts Harvard at the top. “Of the world’s top 20 universities, all but three — Cambridge, Oxford and Tokyo — are in the United States.”

“Some Oakland boys who like to sing are taking on the Department of Homeland Security over the fate of a 12-year-old Polish kid who, in all likelihood, does not have terrorist designs on the United States. Earlier this year, the 7-year-old Pacific Boychoir was contacted by the Youth Choir Foundation in Boston to gauge its interest in accepting 12-year-old Adam Kutny, a gifted alto who found himself somewhat stranded artistically after the choir he belonged to dissolved.” The choir was interested, but the Department of Homeland Security has flatly denied Kutny a student visa, saying (bizarrely) that it cannot be certain that the school is, in fact, a school. Two senators, a congresswoman and the choir are battling the decision.

The touring rock concert/John Kerry fundraiser being led by Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., and other leftist musicians has sparked confusion nationwide among radio stations, consumers, and media conglomerates who are worried that purchasing tickets could run them afoul of complicated campaign finance laws. In Minneapolis, one Clear Channel radio station pulled out of an agreement to distribute free tickets to its participants after the parent company concluded that it could not buy the tickets, because the company sponsoring the concert is a so-called “527 organization,” involved in political affairs. In fact, the purchase would have been legal after all, but Clear Channel still isn’t buying.

“The IRS has announced an aggressive program to investigate the salaries of [nonprofit corporations’] executives and board members, some of which exceed $1 million annually. The government’s interest is twofold: It grants tax-exempt status to nonprofits, and the public contributes billions of dollars to those groups each year.” The $1 million salary figure will apparently serve as the unofficial red flag to investigators, who will then compare such salaries to those of comparable individuals in comparable organizations elsewhere.